Jira Automation - change the parent a task when a certain condition is met.

Question

Hi all,

I'm trying to configure the following automation in Jira:

- If a task is created with a certain word in the summary → move it to a specific parent (+ send an email)

We are pretty new to Jira and had this automation in our previous software.
Third party programs create 'tasks' in our Jira project, and currently we manually move it to the correct parent.

Since these tasks all contain specific keywords, we feel like this could be automated pretty easily, but looking through the automations I'm unable to figure out how to change the value of the parent.

Would very much appreciate the help, or just know if it's not possible.

Thanks!

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Please expand all the sections in the audit log details and repost the image.  Is suspect Summary did not exactly match "CHANGE USER" (including the case).

Robin Van Noorwege · Answer

Hi Bill,

I implemented the automation, but it seems it stops at the create variable part.

The flow I created:

Variable:

Edit:

I tried removing the re-fetch part, but it doesn't seem to have an impact.

Any idea?

Thanks,

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Thanks for those rule images, and...

When using the Issue Created trigger, I recommend always adding the Re-fetch Issue action immediately after it.  That trigger can fire so quickly that some data may not be available to the rule yet, causing weird symptoms and rule errors.  The re-fetch will slow the rule down a bit, reloading the data before proceeding.

Next, there are two ways to set the Parent to a specific issue: smart values and JSON.  Let's do the first one using a Created Variable.

* trigger: issue created
* action: re-fetch issue
* condition: Summary contains "CHANGE USER"
* action: create variable* name: varParentKey
* value: your key, such as ABC-123

* action: edit issue, setting the Parent to {{varParentKey}}* It is not obvious from the UX that a smart value may be directly typed into the Parent field
* Type in the smart value, and it will appear below the field
* When it does, select it to use for the edit

Please try that and let me know what happens.  Thanks!